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November 28, 2008
The myriad faces of defiance
Their actions in the face of Nazi horrors made them all heroes.
OLGA LIVSHIN
The Holocaust was a time of unspeakable horror and deprivation for the Jews of Europe. It was also a time of Jewish heroism and resistance. Jewish defiance took many forms: from shooting and bombing, to collecting recipes and writing letters to preserve the life that was being destroyed. Two current exhibits at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) outline the varied directions Jewish resistance took.
The travelling exhibit Scream the Truth at the World is based on the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of reports, clandestine press, postcards, essays and other documentation reflecting Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto. The second exhibit, In Defiance: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, is a complementary presentation of the centre with local content. It offers visitors the stories of five Jews who defied the Nazis in five different ways, survived the Holocaust, immigrated to Canada and made British Columbia their second home.
Frieda Miller, executive director of the VHEC, said during the opening night ceremony last month that, "This exhibit draws inspiration from the artifacts and testimonies of survivors who settled in Canada after the war.... It speaks of Jewish efforts to maintain their humanity, preserve their past, document unimaginable events and sabotage Nazi war efforts." The responses to Nazism highlighted by the exhibition range from smaller – but no less courageous – gestures to grand escapades worthy of a war epic.
The first heroine was Adelle Balla, a young Jewish woman from Hungary. When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, the Nazis, as they had elsewhere, began systematically exterminating Jews in that country. Balla's husband was deported, but she escaped captivity with her infant son and her family's treasured Torah. Hiding and moving from place to place, keeping one step ahead of the killers, she never abandoned the cherished scroll in its wooden box. It weighed more than five pounds, adding considerably to her burden, but preserving the Torah as the symbol of her family's heritage was paramount to her. In 1982, Imre Balla, Adelle Balla's son, immigrated to Canada, and the Torah travelled with him. His family donated the scroll to the Holocaust Centre after his death in 2002.
Leon Kahn was 16 when the Nazis invaded Lithuania in 1941. After witnessing the mass murders of the local Jews by the Nazis, he and his brother joined the armed resistance. With his unit, Leon participated in many acts of sabotage against the Nazis: the partisans blew up roads and railways, cut down telephone lines and hunted and executed Lithuanian collaborators. By the time the Russian army liberated Lithuania in 1944, Kahn was the only member of his family still alive. Of the 5,000 Jews of his hometown, only 24 survived.
Kahn told the poignant story of his coming of age during the war in his memoir No Time to Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter, published by Ronsdale Press in 2004. An expert in blowing up German trains, he witnessed death upon death of both friends and enemies. Sometimes he couldn't even tell one from another, he wrote. The memoir ends with Kahn's immigration to Canada in 1948.
Another portion of the Holocaust Centre exhibit is dedicated to Rebecca Buckman Teitelbaum and her cookbook from Ravensbrück. She spent 17 months of her life in that concentration camp, working alongside other female prisoners at a munitions factory. After their long and tiring workdays, the women gathered in their barracks, remembering happier times and delicious meals. Buckman Teitelbaum stole some paper and pencils from the factory and wrote down the recipes, creating a handwritten cookbook – a symbol of better days, reminding them all of chocolate mousses, dignity, love and freedom. A cookbook might seem a small act of defiance, compared to gun fighting, but Buckman Teitelbaum risked her life for those scraps of stolen papers. If the guards had discovered her, she likely would have been punished severely or even killed.
Also on display are a ring, comb and mirror, which belonged to Sarah Rozenberg-Warm. She was 16 when the war started. Interned in the Warsaw Ghetto until it was destroyed by the Nazis, she was later sent to Majdanek and worked at a munitions factory. Under the deprivations of their captivity, faced with imminent death and the contempt of the Nazis, prisoners tried to maintain a semblance of humanity. Young men made small tokens of appreciation from stolen metal and secretly presented those gifts to their female co-workers. When Rozenberg-Warm received her ring, comb and mirror from one of the boys, she hid them from the guards and then kept them her whole life. Even when hope dwindled to nothing, they gave her the strength to carry on.
Then there is the story of a young man from Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Vrba. One of only five Jews who ever escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Vrba and his fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler wrote a report on the situation in the death camp and on the implementation of Hitler's Final Solution. Their 60-page account, known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report, was one of the most significant eyewitness testimonies of Auschwitz to reach the outside world. It was distributed to many Allies' embassies, the Red Cross and the Vatican.
These five lives represented those who were lucky: they survived the Holocaust, moved to Canada, and raised their children here. "One cannot help but think of the traceless acts of resistance by other survivors, and of the defiance of many who perished, whose stories will never be known," said Miller.
In Defiance runs until May 22.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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